Absented presence

Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a multidisciplinary artist and fourth generation Australian South Sea Islander, whose practice delves into the cultural memory and shared histories of the Great Ocean (Pacific) slave trade. Her practice is heavily grounded in extensive archival research to examine the historical practice of ‘blackbirding’ – the stealing or forced coercion of Great Ocean people to Australia for indentured labour on sugar and cotton plantations. She is particularly interested in investigating the complex relationships of power, cultural identity and political systems, to address the complexities of contemporary South Sea Islander culture in and outside of Australia.

Passage 2022, Absented Presence 2022 and Absented Presence, II 2022 are three works by Togo-Brisby that draw on her ongoing practice and multiple previous works that include references to (slave) ships, crows, and sugar. Where a ship appears in Togo-Brisby’s work, a fluid sense of time materialises. This is an aesthetic tool of the artists’, to make a concentrated and conscious effort to take hold of memory and to speak to its entangled inheritance across the Great Ocean and trans-Atlantic slave trades.

Togo-Brisby’s use of crow feathers is to impress upon her works the same threateningly inauspicious associations that are associated with the crow, as it has appeared in film and literature. The ships, by association, become ominous or malevolent objects implicated in the history of slavery. The very material also heightens their metaphoric associations with the term blackbirding, which romanticises the harrowing experience of kidnapping and coercion.